Fiction is a Three-Edged Swordhttps://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com
Fiction, interactive fiction and narrativeSat, 31 Jan 2015 21:48:58 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/89dc1a93c1d1114602e28c9fc9cc39e3?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngFiction is a Three-Edged Swordhttps://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com
Parser as Prototype: why choice-based games are more interestinghttps://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/parser-as-prototype-why-choice-based-games-are-more-interesting/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/parser-as-prototype-why-choice-based-games-are-more-interesting/#commentsThu, 05 Dec 2013 17:11:07 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/?p=494Continue reading →]]>Gosh, but it’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. The reason for that is I’ve been tied up with inkle: the last post was September ’12, which was about when we started on our Sorcery! series, and that hasn’t really let up. Sorcery!, if you don’t know, is a series of choice-based text-games for touch screens, that’s done pretty well so far. I’ve been working on the design, and also done the adaptation from the original gamebooks to our inklewriter-based format.

But that’s not really what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to write about the type of games we’re now making. They’re not parser games – they use choices – but in terms of design, they’ve ended up being closer to parser games than anything else. In fact, I’ve got a provocative statement to make, which is this.

“Parser games are prototypes of choice-based games.”

This is not quite true, but it’s quite close to something true. I’m now going to try and argue it.

A Matter of Structure

First up, I don’t want to start inventing terms, but I want to talk about the underlying models behind the game, and not just the interface into that model. Our games have explicit choices – but so does everything from Versu to Choice of Games to a traditional book CYOA. But in terms of how these stories are created, these examples form a spectrum from simulation through to state-machine. We’re on that spectrum ourselves, somewhere left of centre.

We don’t use a simulation-ready engine. By which I mean, none of our games have an update loop. There isn’t a single code-path that gets called on every “turn” of the game, so there’s nowhere sensible to update timers or process background events (note: I mean, nowhere in the script. The apps themselves have update loops, obviously).

Instead, we our scripting language is built around a state-machine: a tree of text, with options that branch to other bits of text, and joins that link the story-flow back up again. It’s got a memory: as the player works through, the engine remembers what you chose and alters counters and flags appropriately, and this information is used to alter the text and choices that appear later.

Modelling the World

But the devil is in the data. We use it to model explicit things, that’s straightforward enough – how much health or money do you have, have you learnt a fact about the backstory yet. But we also do a lot more implicit modelling, say friend/foe counters for what characters think of you, and what the game thinks of you, that alter the game appropriately. These are interesting because they are altered not by one decision but by many. Use enough of these hidden switches, and the outcome of any given play-through might become difficult to predict even for its author, though of course, all the outcomes themselves are pre-scripted.

But it doesn’t end there: we also have support for named constants and routines, and those can either be calculations or – with a bit more infrastructure in the script – sub-sections of story, that are dropped into, played through, and then returned from. That means with a little more work we can start to model the game world. For instance, we can keep track of the time of day, and create a day/night cycle when the hour shifts past dawn or dusk. Characters can move around the map, based on rules and goals which shift, using variables to track where they were last, and what they think they want.

We can then insert new text, options and even little chunks of interactivity into the flow depending on variable-state: adding in options to talk to characters if they happen to be where you are; or different options for manipulating items if they’re in the required state. We can insert the same interactive chunk into multiple places on multiple occasions (using cycles and sequences in the text to prevent the repetition from becoming obvious). At this point, what we’re doing is more like adding responses to standard commands in Inform than anything you could do in a gamebook.

The Design Process

During the construction of Sorcery! 2, and as we move into Sorcery! 3, which is going to be even more open-world-ish – these possibility are starting to mess with my head. The more I write like this, the more I’m turning off the multiple-choice part of my brain, and turning back on the parser-IF design side. The design process of locations, puzzles and interactions is starting to feel more the process behind The Mulldoon Legacy or Make It Good than the process behind games like The Intercept.

Instead of simply writing, laying down choices that endlessly move the story forward, we’re now constructing locations, adding details, altering the description of those details based on state, providing options to manipulate those states, and providing outcomes based on reaching certain states. That is to say: create rooms, with objects, and puzzles.

So that’s to say, our choice-based games are reaching up out of the gutter to approach the fidelity of a parser game. But parser games are still richer, right? They have hidden affordances, moments of inspiration, that sense of infinite freedom…

The Myth of Freedom

Well, don’t they? I started to think that, no, maybe they don’t. I mean, it’s obvious a parser game doesn’t allow you to type anything. But more importantly, the player at the keyboard of a parser game doesn’t act like the game can understand anything either.

A player – at least, one who is capable of playing – approaches the game with a list of relevant verbs, with an eye for useable nouns, and with an ear for the normal interactions of movement, stacking objects, and pushing, pulling and touching things. They learn new verbs if new verbs are introduced, and mostly complain if new verbs are expected but are not introduced. When we play a parser game in that fluid way we enjoy, we are not playing a game of infinite scope or freedom. We’re playing a game of finite choices, we’re just assembling and filtering that list in our heads, instead of the computer doing it for us.

I’ve argued in the past that for parser games to be penetrable to newcomers, we need to improve the input loop and ensure, at the very least that (a) the player cannot type anything the game simply won’t understand, due to incorrect verbs, or typos, or whatever; and (b) any error, clarification or other null-content messages the player invokes should not hang around a moment longer than they are useful. The player’s scroll-back should be a stream of content, positively-reinforcing perfect playthrough.

But while these two things are now both possible – Interactive Parsing does one, Vorple the other – I no longer think they’re enough. Having the game not let me type a command that it won’t understand is a good way to teach me to interact with parsers, but it’s still the game saying “no” to wrong input. Instead, why shouldn’t the game do that filtering of the context for me?

If it did – if it filtered all the possible input down to what’s sensible and interesting, and then presented them as a choice – surely then the game is reinforcing my presence and position in that world, and not detracting from it. In this new game, every action I take is interacting directly with something which has been determined to be interesting, rewarding and worth my attention. I am in a loop of meaningful activity.

Building A Choice-Based Parallel

The choice-based games we’re now making at inkle are stabs in this direction: they have simple world-models, but clever contextual recognition: we’ll turn options on when they’re relevant and hide them when they’re not.

If you want the joy of the puzzle where you think to do X with the Y, you can still have it, but as an author you simply need to put X and Y in different places and have your player think of bringing them together: that act is, in itself, enough. You want more detail? Make Y a subelement that the player needs to choose to act on, before being given options of how to act — that’s exactly what your text game player is doing in his head as he constructs his X with Y plan, after all.

You want to replicate that moment in Spider And Web? You can; although, the solution will most likely be brute-forceable now. But how many players brute-forced that moment anyway…?

You want to replicate that moment in Photopia? Harder, perhaps, but you can still have a long choice of verbs… and if the solution isn’t the first the player tries, they’ll still have a moment of delight when it works…

A Shift Of Default

So, at the very least, a choice-game can start to approximate a parser game, to a less or greater extent. We can maybe agree that.

But what about all the things a choice-game does better? Like forward-momentum, story, and dialogue? Simple cause-and-effect? A variation of scale – interacting over moments one minute, years the next? Make It Good contains 5 characters and took 10 years to write; Sorcery! 2 has about forty and took 6 months. None are quite as complex as the ones in Make It Good, true, but several are really quite complex, and can be goaded, fooled, tricked, bribed, discouraged, and misled, over the course of short-to-medium length interactions.

In a choice-based framework, it is easy to make time pass; it is the natural state of play. And this is where I get my “prototype” statement from. There are things I can do in a parser game which I can basically do in a choice-based game, but there are things I can do in a choice-based game which are virtually impossible in a parser game. So, bar a few edge cases, and specific, unusual effects, the choice-based game with a strong underlying world-model provides for a wider super-class of experiences and narratives.

In general: if we’re comparing a system which has an update loop (parser IF) and a system with a spine (standard choice-based authoring), I think what I’m finding is that it’s far easier to call out to an update loop from the story spine than it is to create a story spine from inside an update loop where the passing of time can only ever be inferred.

Context-Free Actions

In fact, I’d argue there’s only one area that parser games hold high over choice-based structures, and that’s “context-free actions”: actions which are always available, but have little impact on the game-state; such as examining, checking your inventory, or moving around the map. They’re not totally context-free, of course, but in a choice-based game, it’s hard to insert them into the right point in the flow because they can be executed at more or less any moment, and indeed, might need to be.

These verbs open the scope of parser games a little – they let the player break out of the forward flow of the game to gather information from around the world, and across their possessions and what they can see. I think it’s here that the “freedom” of the parser game really lies – not in the commands at all, but in the breadth of objects that can be passively examined at any time.

Still, though; having the main game feed fill up with examinations of items – and often repeated examinations – does seem a little less than perfect. Solutions to that have been tried with multiple windows, showing maps and inventory screens – but these somehow never quite gel, and I suspect it’s because suddenly listing out these options in parallel with the main game starts to make the experience feel overwhelming. (Something the parser does well is to provide a large possibility space that looks like a small one. In fact, I’d argue the parser does a better job of seeming constrained than it does of feeling open..!)

Leaning on the Interface

So for our games, we’ve cheated. We’ve created an interface layer on top of the game. We have a visual map, because having something to look at helps, and so the player can understand they are moving around. We’ve created inventory screens, and placed Examine buttons on those screens, as well as adding Examine choices into the normal flow at places where it made sense. It’s the multiple window solution – but we’ve made them stack in a rather attractive way, and I think we got away with it.

The resulting balance is, I think, quite effective: and as we set about constructing Sorcery! 3, we’re finding that starting to play out. The new game is being built with a framework of locations, objects and map connections; these fire off calls to update-loop-style routines which do turn-by-turn work, before calling set-piece-like sequences of choice-based flow that carry the meat of each scene. At the end of the scene, we pass flow back to the map layer. The result is a choice-based game which allows free exploration of an environment, object-based puzzles, but which on meeting a character can drop instantly into dialogue-based conversation without a change in interface or tone.

Testing will, no doubt, be a nightmare, just as for a parser game.

And a voice in the back of my head is nagging me to try porting Make It Good. I think it could be done. I fear it would be better.

Bletchley Park, 1942. A component from the Bombe machine, used to decode intercepted German messages, has gone missing. One of the cryptographers is waiting to be interviewed, under direst suspicion. Is he stupid enough to have attempted treason? Or is he clever enough to get away?

Available now is a new short interactive story, The Intercept. It’s a culmination of several different ideas, systems and projects that I’ve had floating around for a while. It’s playable online, and also downloadable as an ebook for Kindle devices, using the new inklewriter to ebook conversion we just announced over at inkle. (If you’ve no idea what that means, please take a look at inkle‘s own site).

The Setting

The first thing about The Intercept is the setting – Bletchley Park. This is a stately home in England that was used by the military for code-breaking during WWII. They recruited a team of brilliant, awkward scientists using all manner of baroque tests and competitions (a crossword in the Daily Telegraph was used at point) and here, locked away from the War, this group cracked the “uncrackable” Enigma code and developed the world’s first computer (if you don’t count Babbage’s calculating machine).

This isn’t the first time Bletchley’s appeared in interactive fiction – there’s an Enigma breaking sequence in Graham Nelson’s epic Jigsaw - and it’s a great section, even if it does require the player to actually decode an Engima message. The Intercept is somewhat lower tech – it’s a play-by-choices, and the code-breaking is strictly a metaphor at play, rather than an actual challenge.

The Mechanics

The core interaction in The Intercept is an idea I first tried out in Flaws and rather fell in love with, even though that story doesn’t use it much beyond the shock-value opening.

That game opens:

…and offers the player what I find is quite an intriguing two-dimensional choice – do you want to save the character, at the risk of being deceitful; or do you want to find out what’s going on in the story, but possibly at the expense of the main character?

I find that in one swift move this knocks away some of the props of interactive storytelling. It says, explicitly, up front, that you aren’t going to see every way this story can pan out, that your choices will matter, and that you’re going to have to do the best you can with the limited information you’ve got. This is not an optimisation problem.

I hope you think that’s as interesting as I do, because The Intercept takes that idea and – more or less – rolls it out into a full-length game, though here the choices are usually “Yes”, “No”, “Lie” and “Evade”. Again, there are trade-offs to be made between what the protagonist knows, and affecting the situation around you. Though in this story, it’s somewhat internalised – the protagonist is admitting things to himself as much as to his interrogator, and those choices of “Lie” and “Evade” are as much instructions to lie to himself, or dodge a truth he doesn’t want to recognise.

Structure

The structure is a bit accretive, with replays adding to your knowledge, a little bit strategic, but since it’s all choice-based with no parser, replay is hopefully not too painful an experience. Underlying this is the metaphor of a cryptogram – the classic method of solution is to guess a correspondence of a letter based on hints and clues, and follow it through until you reach a solution, or a contradiction, in which case you back up and try a different path.

So it’s Make It Good meets Flaws with a bit of the Mulldoon Legacy thrown in.

Inklewriter

It’s also been written in inklewriter, inkle’s free, online web-app for creating branching stories. It’s the longest, heftiest use of the software that I know about, with around thirty variables in a mixture of flags and counters. It tracks some emotional state data, what you’ve done and what you’ve seen, has loops, branches, and text that varies depending on what you’ve seen and done so far.

It was originally written partly as a test-case of our “convert to Kindle” service (built on the Kindliser script that’s up on this site). This works in a slightly bonkers fashion, playing every single possible game, then crunching down and optimising duplicates. The inklewriter version is a little smarter and employs some pre-optimisation, which takes the number of unoptimised compiled pages down to 50,000 from, um, several million. (The final book is a mere 5000 pages long, which compresses to a natty 1.6mb Kindle ebook file. The Kindle itself doesn’t even blink).

Links

For those of you who get this far, here are the “how to play” links over again, so you don’t have to scroll back up.

]]>https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/new-interactive-story-the-intercept/feed/8joningoldThe InterceptFlaws openingWhat’s past is prologue…https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/working-on-a-ne/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/working-on-a-ne/#commentsTue, 07 Aug 2012 09:35:56 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/?p=451Continue reading →]]>Working on a new branching narrative project for inkle has crystallised in my head a problem I think I’ve often skirted around, but not ever pinned down before; and it’s a problem that sits right the heart of interactive narrative design.

The problem is this: if we’re tracking what the player chooses, and using that to alter how events play out, then how do we decide when to cause, and how do we decide when to affect?

There’s a conversation going on here – the reader says something, and the author says something back. The best interactive writing matches the author’s reply to the reader’s comment so perfectly it feels like there must be a human being inside the machine, typing furiously away.

But how do we decide who gets to hold the talking stick at any given moment?

You Are Being Watched

To be specific – the project we’re working on tracks a few, emotion-based stats. Are you friendly, or surly? Are you selfish, or generous? Are you hasty, or cautious? When you take decisions early in the story, each of these balances is tipped until we start to get a sense of what kind of character you want to be.

Let’s take the last one as our case study. At the start of the game, you can get up and straight on with your task – or you can take a while, exploring and finding out the groundwork first. That adjusts the stats we track. When you approach the first location in the journey, you can scope it out, or go straight in, and that adjusts the stat again.

Then we use that stat to alter things in the story and the game-world. Do you sense a trap coming in advance of it being sprung? Does the stranger you meet feel inclined to be friendly towards you because you’ve got that kind of face? Does your gut feeling about his trustworthiness match the reality of the situation?

Me vs The World

This is the simplest model of player-tracking: a straight conversation between reader and author. The reader picks their option, and the author adjusts the story to match. Want to be surly? Then every character who meets you will be grumpy. Want to be flirty? Then every character who meets you will like you, except the married ones, who’ll find you oddly threatening. Want to be sneaky? Then everyone who meets you will be surprised to see you.

Every interactive story should have a bit of this – it feels responsive when the game nudges, winks and says, I saw what you did there. But if that’s the only way the player’s choices get used, the results can start to feel a little uncomfortable. After all, if everyone in this world hates me, and I hate them, why do I keep getting the option to give them flowers? (Even if, when I do, they throw them back in my face).

In the real world, it’s true that we can change our mode of being on any day we decide to, if we try hard enough. But in a story, characters are not allowed to do that. They have to be true to themselves; whatever that might mean.

So shouldn’t we, at some point, be locking down the options the player gets as well? If we’ve decided the player is a hasty kind of player, shouldn’t we stop offering them cautious options? If they’re a friendly player, shouldn’t we take away the option to be miserable and rude?

If we don’t, we get something a bit like the LA Noire problem, in which the detective flips psychopathically from being polite and gentle, to furiously interrogating, perfectly innocent bereaved housewives — with somewhat comical results, (not to mention making the game rather harder than it should be).

Set up and Punch

There’s a need for a model here. How about, “set up and punch”? We can use the beginning of the game – the first scene, the first act, whatever – as the set up: allow the player to outline their character, pick their sides, lay out the land. Then for the rest of the game, we play those choices out. For the first scene, you get to choose whatever you like, whenever you like. From that point on, we start to edit what choices you get to the kind of character you are.

The Choice of Games games do this explicitly, with RPG-style character creation choices that remove later options.

This is good, because it matches what should be happening in the scope of a story anyway. To begin with, details are important. How does the protagonist talk to people? How much care do they take over what they do? But by the second act of a story, things should be hotting up. It’s no longer about how they do what they do, it’s about what they do, and the repercussions that their actions are having. The main character is still integral, but the reader is now learning about the world, and not the character.

But in the interactive context there’s a downside, as the game will inevitably feel more and more railroaded, as though the writer simply “gave up” on making the story adaptive. (Of course, the far-spectrum alternative is the game feels arbitrary over the long term, with the character contradicting itself from moment to moment, and that’s no good either).

It would seem that set up and punch works well for short stories, but starts to suffer over the long term.

A Series of Ever-Increasing Boxes

One solution might be to think of each act as a separate bit of gameplay. In Act 1, let’s make choices that define if the main character is friendly or moody. In Act 2, let’s use the results of those choices, and now decide if the character is brave or cowardly; and also if they’re physically or mentally inclined. In Act 3, let’s set all of those results in stone, and start deciding if the character is interested in self-promotion, or helping those around him, which will take us to the final turning point – save themselves, or save the city?

That’s how film structures often work (the above is, loosely, a description of The Dark Knight Rises). Looking back on it now, I can see that’s what Dave Morris was doing in Frankenstein – the early parts determine Frankenstein, and his monster’s, empathetic outlook. Later parts develop new models, with the final, most intriguing one being does the narrator trust you, the reader, to make his choices for him?

If Life Is Just A Highway…

But a structure like the one above means there are certain stories you can’t tell – namely, stories with a long scope but a tight focus. If you’re doing an epic about the life of Emperor Claudius, the respect his peers have for him is constantly in the balance, as is his own pride and selfishness. The interactivity should be driving these elements the whole way to the end.

So perhaps there’s room for a more flexible model. Something like driving on a many-laned motorway: at any moment, the player is in one lane or another. Their choices are determined by that lane – they can keep going as they are, they can move in a lane and become more extreme in one direction, or they can move out and move the other way. Swapping lanes isn’t the result of a single choice, but a build of several choices, but once it happens, it’s a definitive switch in the character’s temperament and the options available to them.

At this point, a player reaching Act 3 as a disrespected, prideful despot still has time to save their soul — but, just like getting off the motorway when the slip-road is approaching, they might be running out of time to do it, and it might require some drastic actions to get there before the end arrives.

Of course, from the point of the view of the author, this is a lot of work: by the end of the book you might be supporting five or six variants of a particular action, depending on which “lane” the player is in. But there are ways to handle that kind of thing elegantly, of course: it’s not like every level the character finds themselves on needs to be a different story-thread all of its own. Sometimes, the same material can be reused and just have its language altered.

What’s it all about, anyway?

Underneath all of this is the related problem of telling the reader that any of this is happening. And the key to that is probably not about interactivity, or logic, but rather, about theme. Whatever it is that’s being tracked, followed, and adapted to had better be core to the themes of the book. A reader should either be customising the nail varnish or rewiring the spinal cord of their story: anything in between is going to pass by unnoticed.

(Or you could just simply showing the stats, but that doesn’t necessarily solve anything – if your text doesn’t match what the numbers are doing, then your numbers will start to look fake).

So if your novel is about spies, track loyalty and betrayal. If your novel is about love, track, um, loyalty and betrayal. If your novel is about religion, track faith and despair. If you novel is about an epic journey across a wilderness, track… well, I’ll let you know when we’ve written it.

]]>https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/working-on-a-ne/feed/0joningoldTwo IF Games for Kindlehttps://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/two-if-games-for-kindle/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/two-if-games-for-kindle/#commentsThu, 28 Jun 2012 10:59:05 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/?p=445Continue reading →]]>Well, it’s been a long time since I posted on this blog – inkle has been keeping me pretty busy. But there’s a couple of releases to report, both on active content for Kindle (so US-only!), and both appearing on the same day, as luck would have it.

First up is the game I co-wrote with Ian Finley for Textfyre, The Shadow in the Cathedral. It was nominated for 5 XYZZY awards when first released in 2009, and follows the adventures of 2nd Assistant Clock Polisher Wren in the Abbey of Time, who has one day to stop a deadly conspiracy. Set in a world of clockwork churches, it’s full of action-set-pieces and puzzles.

Secondly, Black Belt Games have created an engine for the Z-machine, allowing them to put out Z-code games for Kindle. (If that meant nothing to you, read: “next up!”) Their first release is Insight, a science-fiction detective story. A genetic designer from Mars is accused of committing the planet’s first murder. But you can prove it?

So how is the experience playing on a Kindle? When I first saw the device I thought this was the <i>perfect</i> home for playing IF, and I still think it’s a better fit than using iOS devices, for which typing is just a bit too horrendous. The Kindle-with-keyboard is a lot nicer to play with, and while it never quite becomes quite as invisible as playing with a real keyboard, there’s a certain magic to playing in the palm of your hand.

After four months development, inkle‘s first project, Frankenstein, written by Dave Morris and published by UK publisher Profile Books, is now available to buy in the App Store.

This isn’t my own writing, but it’s my – and inkle co-founder Joseph Humfrey’s – design for how the UI works, how it guides the reader’s eye and helps keep the interactivity unobtrusive. Big shout-out to Undum here; no-one designs from scratch, they just 1-up the last best thing.

We also designed the back-end authoring format: I hadn’t really realised before quite how much the writing tool affects the kind of story you tell – the ink format is great for providing quick branching and rejoining of stories and flexing the text around based on the minutiae of the choices you’ve made so far (the game remembers everything you ever did).

Dave – author of a huge number of gamebooks, including a couple of Fighting Fantasys and the Knightmare books – took our format and ran with it, producing an entire novel’s worth of content, that alters, rearranges and bends as you influence the story’s two central protagonists. This isn’t so much about number of endings, although that number is greater than 1; this is about numbers of middles.

(Last night, for fun, I tried running the source through the Kindliser tool, which produces static gamebooks; the result was a file 4Gb big, containing ~3.5 million paragraphs, and it hadn’t finished.)

It’s possible in the ink format, but a bit more work, to make object/state-based puzzles: Frankenstein has none, but our next release, due in a month or so, has a few, and our late 2012 game has a lot.

But more on those later. For today, I’m going to sit back, and watch some analytics.

]]>https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/inkles-frankenstein-is-released/feed/2joningoldFrankensteinCracks @ Black Static #28https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/cracks-black-static-28-3/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/cracks-black-static-28-3/#commentsWed, 11 Apr 2012 15:29:55 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/cracks-black-static-28-3/Continue reading →]]>I seem to have accidentally written a horror story, or close enough to one that it’s coming out in Black Static‘s latest issue, in a week or so. Here’s the cover splash, courtesy of TTA.

For fans of the genre, Black Static gets consistently great reviews from around the horror zine scene, so it’s an honour to appear there. The big question will be, will I have the nerve to read the rest of the issue?

In other fiction-writing news, my story from last year Sleepers has been picked up to appear… elsewhere. Details on that when it comes out.

]]>https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/cracks-black-static-28-3/feed/2joningoldCover spread for CracksThe final 5%https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/the-final-5/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/the-final-5/#commentsThu, 15 Mar 2012 19:28:48 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/?p=423Continue reading →]]>If you watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica, you’ll know that after two or three years of escaping murderous robots with LED eyes and their sleazy-nightclub-owner-type owners, the last surviving humans were faced with the terrible threat of the Final Five. Five last Cylons who could yet destroy everything. Hard to pin down, hard to defeat, hard to negotiate with…

It’s something that anyone who’s worked on long projects can sympathise with. Projects can be easy or hard, but every project ends with that final 5%: the final 5% that nearly kills you.

I’ll be honest, this post is really about Frankenstein, inkle‘s first interactive novel app, which is out on April 26th. This is a project I’ve been working on full-time since December and designing, in a way, since I wrote My Angel back in 2000. Frankenstein is high-quality interactive storytelling built for a mainstream audience. It’s beautiful visuals combined seamlessly with great writing and a smooth, slick, gets-gone interface. It’s a lovely piece of work.

Almost. Really, very, almost. There are just a few last touches. Just that final 5% to get perfect.

Part of the problem with that final 5% is the injustice. It shouldn’t be hard to finish a project. After all, by the time it’s 95% complete, you finally know exactly what your project is. You know how every part will come together. There are no unanswered questions, no unexplored corners, no hidden problems. The clarity of vision can be dizzying after months, or years, of working on a project where the end is just a distant dream.

I remember, as I came to the end of Make It Good, the unreality quality of it. It was inconceivable that my to-do list on that game had shrunk from a 2,000 line text file to a set of three points, one of which was a bit of pharmaceutical research that – you know what? – I never did. After ten years of work, all the individual pieces were there, and not only that, they fitted together.

(And then the bug reports came in. That was Make It Good‘s final five – all the testers who did things ever-so-slightly off the order I’d thought of, and brought the complex, intricate logic crashing down. The bugs are gone now, I think: I’ve not had a report for Make It Good in two years beyond a few typos, although I get letters from players most months. But there was a moment there when I thought, this is it, it can never work…)

It’s particularly special, here at inkle, because we’re not just in the final 5% for Frankenstein, but also for inklewriter, our web-based writing tool which just needs a little bit more polish, and for an as-yet-unannounced HTML 5 project which is almost wrapped up.

It’s enough to make me want to start something else long and complicated, just so I can remember what it’s like to be free to make things up, unsure if they’ll work, or be worth doing at all. (Actually, we’ve got that covered as well, now that I look at my notepad).

But there’s no avoiding it. Starting something else is just prolonging the problem.

The trouble is, that final 5% looks like a small amount of work, and it actually is, but it’s exhausting and takes all the skill you have to get right because, being the last thing you do, you don’t get as much chance to revise as you did with the rest of the project. There’s no new information coming around the corner: no revelatory moments where you gain sudden new perspectives. The final 5% faces you up against the purest challenge. Here is the project, here is the problem, and either you can do it – or you can’t.

A lot of projects don’t make it through. The final 5% can be the thing that kills a good idea dead and leaves the audience bemused, underwhelmed, or throwing their pads against the wall. For games, it tends to be bad balancing, or a puzzle early on that’s too dull or too hard. (Heavenly Sword‘scannonball sequence. The dodgy aiming in Uncharted 1. Hell, even Ico had that bit with the bomb and chandelier and the pillar.)

For novels and movies, it’s that missing “wow” factor, that ropey ending, that over-long edit. The final 5% is the polish and tightness that ties an okay story together into a fantastic one. (And it is only 5% – compare Blade Runner and the Director’s Cut.)

For TV shows like Battlestar, there’s a particular final 5% that rears its head when the series is running out its budget. (And Battlestar jumped the shark on its final five so determinedly it’s almost like the writers simply drew lots to see just how badly they could wrap things up. The Lost guys did the same a year or so later.)

For software like inklewriter, it’s what happens when you press the Escape key, or the up arrow, or hit Tab. It’s the two or three places where it runs just a bit slowly.

For IF it’s the place where the user types HYPERVENTILATE and the game understands.

For Frankenstein, it’s the transitions – you’ll know what I mean when you read it.

Of course, the only way to get through the final 5% is the same way you got through the rest of the project. You make a list, and you do the list. You put one foot in front of the other and keep going. You make the best decisions you can and test out what you’ve got. And you keep faith because, in (time of project so far / 19) more days, it will be done and it will be awesome…

And when that happens, your reward will be to start something new. And it’s not like starting stuff isn’t really difficult too.

A Colder Light is my first released game since 2009’s Make It Goodand The Shadow in the Cathedral. This one is considerably shorter and easier than both of those. It’s also my first text adventure to use no keyboard input. It’s a short tale of magic, courage, animism and ice.

No save is implemented, although the game is short enough that you shouldn’t need it.

The game doesn’t work nicely on phones, but should play okay and runs dog-slow on an iPad.

Comments in the comments, and bugs to the address in the help text, if you please!

]]>https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/new-game-a-colder-light/feed/21A Colder LightjoningoldA Colder LightA game is for life, not just for Christmas…https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/a-game-is-for-life-not-just-for-christmas/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/a-game-is-for-life-not-just-for-christmas/#commentsMon, 26 Dec 2011 14:43:43 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/?p=395Continue reading →]]>Merry Christmas, and if you’ve just unwrapped a new game, here’s a sobering puppy-for-life type statistic which is urban legend in the games industry, and might even be true: the majority of console games are played once.

So what? you might think. Most books are read once, most DVDs are watched once, most Christmas cakes eaten once… But I don’t mean finished, I mean played. The majority of console games are opened, installed, booted up, played for a single session (possibly of several hours), then never booted up again. Even though games can afford tens of hours of entertainment; and even though games cost four times as much as books or films.

And that isn’t true of books, or DVDs, or Christmas cake. So why the difference? Is it just because people can get stuck on games?

I don’t think so. I think it’s deeper than that. In fact, I’m not sure there is a difference between the consumption pattern for a DVD, book or a game. I think instead that the difference is in what we mean by the word finished. (And, what is inkle going to do about it?)

The length of a game can be a tricky thing to measure at the best of times. Many games provide a variety of play-modes, from different difficulty levels through to different characters, storylines and abilities to try. Some games don’t even end, like the eternally popular multiplayer side of games like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

So when has a player “finished”? I’d argue a player finishes when they’ve learnt all that they expect to learn: that is, when the game ceases to surprise. The moment when every damn level is the same as every damn level before, that’s the moment when the game is finished. From there, a player either trades it in, or keeps playing in that trance-like addictive state that parents find so worrying. (Or in some rare cases, keeps going to see what happens in the story. But those cases are really pretty rare.)

The best evidence I have for this idea is from playing Assassin’s Creed II. The player takes the role of a member of a secret assassin’s guild in a rich simulation of medieval Florence and Venice. The cities are modelled on their real-life counterparts, and the player is given the task of navigating their streets, crowds, rooftops and canals to complete a variety of missions against the powerful ruling elite.

It’s a game which is remarkable for being almost entirely one long tutorial. The game features a staggeringly large number of things the player can do, but they’re all introduced gracefully so that the game is still teaching new mechanics at 70% complete (the pistols, the extended jump). By that point most normal games have settled down into a familiar rut and are simply ramping the difficulty curve.

This constant learning made for good fun – each new mechanic introduced a new challenge, opened up a new route, or provided a new way of interacting with the simulated crowds. But despite the breadth, most people I know gave up on the game without reaching its end. And most gave up around the same point – the Venetian street carnival, an extended sequence of (none-too-difficult) challenges in which no new mechanics were introduced. People said, “They felt they had seen all the game had to offer.”

Assassin’s Creed, a very beautiful game with remarkably few assassinations in it, is a great demonstration of the parallel draws of novelty and mechanics. The mechanics in the game are not great: the stealth is fussy, and the running away sequences poorly balanced and quite repetitive. The first game in the series relied on these mechanics, and it got quickly very dry. But the scope of the world in the sequel, and the amount of novelty it is able to offer, is very large, because of the breadth and depth of its simulated cities and citizens.

By way of a quick contrast, Valve’s game Portal introduces a novel concept (creating spatial portals linking the world together in Moebius-strip fashion) which has lots of subtle depth (arising from momentum, angle, timing, that kind of thing), which it then develops with even more novelty in its level design. It’s a great example of the two aspects of a game working together in a mutually supportive way. And most people, I think, played Portal through to its end. (In fairness, of course, it was short, rewarding, and superlative.)

Most games are built squarely around repeatable mechanics – that is, a limited set of things that the player can do, which cause reasonably predictable consequences in the world of the game, with modifiers depending on the luck and skill of the player. It’s certainly true that a game with good mechanics will last, and a game with actively bad mechanics will fail.

But I think there’s another way, and that’s the direction we’re taking over at inkle for our Frankenstein project. A game – or rather, an interactive experience – can instead have simple mechanics, and be founded more on its content, and on the novelty and discovery inherent in that content. You know; the way a book is. It can be built in such a way that to be finished means to be completed rather than merely to be understood.

We hope that when people read/play (“relay”?) Frankenstein, they’ll all get to the bit where it says The End. (And then they’ll sit back, sigh, think, ‘what a great story,’ and post or tweet a nice review someplace.) If they don’t replay it that won’t be a fail. But if they play only the first chapter, think, ‘I get it,’ and put it down, then we will have missed out mark.

On a few months now until we find out!

]]>https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/a-game-is-for-life-not-just-for-christmas/feed/3joningoldAssassin's CreedPortalFrankenstein, from inkleIs this the end?https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/is-this-the-end/
https://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/is-this-the-end/#commentsThu, 22 Dec 2011 18:58:54 +0000http://threeedgedsword.wordpress.com/?p=390Continue reading →]]>I’ve been busting my way through a holiday text adventure, the way one does. A couple of days off is the perfect time to get 80% of a game down, ready to be shelved, redrafted, tweaked, and polished until it no longer seems like such a good idea.

I had the puzzle structure worked out before I coded a single word. I’m now 80% of the way through, but then I got distracted, adding hyperlinks.

I just turned off the actual text prompt thing. It seemed so… retro. There are just these buttons now. It feels kinda okay.